


Saved to a Drafts Folder on a Fine Autumn Day

by orphan_account



Series: Inclinations [11]
Category: due South
Genre: Angst, Dramatic Irony, Epistolary, F/F, M/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-17
Updated: 2012-06-17
Packaged: 2017-11-07 22:33:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/436172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lisa sees Ray, but doesn't bother to say hi.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saved to a Drafts Folder on a Fine Autumn Day

**Author's Note:**

> Notes at the end with spoilers.

Hey, babe,

Man, office hours are slow today. Now that advising is over, everyone’s out getting wrecked so I’ll have a few weeks like this before they start showing up with obituary notices about their dead grandmothers and can they just please have a tiny little extension? Anyway, you’ll probably be getting a lot of weird links and notes (I promise, no kitties playing the piano!) from me for a few weeks. 

I had the coolest thing happen today. I ran into an old…friend…I guess you’d call him, and I had the best time catching him up with him even though I don’t think he even saw me.

Let me explain. You know how much I love to.

There’s this guy I worked with briefly, ages ago. I was tending bar while also taking day classes at Northwestern; the bar decided to try to reinvent itself as a dance club on late weekend nights. They got in a cop to moonlight as their bouncer, even though he was not at all beefy like most people think bouncers need to be. No, he was wiry but looked like he could do some damage. He didn’t really look like what I thought cops looked like. He had spiky hair, a few touches of punk rock.

We didn’t become best buds, but we talked when things were slow. He was going through a messy divorce, and clearly trying his best not to sink into self-pity (but not always succeeding). I was having a rough time, too. We both came from blue collar families. His wife was apparently quite a bit further up the ladder, and one of his problems was that he kept bumping into those invisible class walls we all know about. Well, except for well-meaning upper-middle-class people who don’t think there’s a wall at all and would be horrified to know just how uncomfortable they make us. I was running into those walls a lot those days; if you’re a blue collar baby going to a school at a place like Northwestern, you’re going to get a lot of bruises. 

Still hurts sometimes, even now that I’m on the other side of the lectern.

Anyway, I finally had my chance to go out with girls who weren’t trying to re-create straight relationships (jeez, I almost called them “heteronormative” because now that I’m an academic, I simply can’t turn off the jargon). Instead, they were into making statements. Politicizing the personal and personalizing the political. I just wanted to meet a nice woman who was into sex and didn’t mind if things got a little bit freaky between the sheets from time to time. And I wasn’t having much luck.

So he and I shared our troubles and he kept telling me, in various colorful ways, that one day I was absolutely going to meet the right woman and we’d get season tickets for the Hawks and adopt little kids from Cambodia. He was really funny, he had some great original turns of phrase and an oddly charming idiosyncratic kind of disfluency; part dyslexia and part something else I couldn’t quite figure out. But he’d barrel on even if sometimes the words came out in the wrong order.

We ended up going our separate ways after a few months, but I saw him just the other day. I wanted to go up and say hi, that I’m seeing a terrific woman these days, although she seems more interested in the White Sox than hockey. I figured I’d keep the fact that your family regularly gets invited into the plush visitor’s boxes to myself. But I realized I didn’t need to ask how he was doing, because he was clearly with someone and they were clearly in love.

And it was another man. He’d told me a lot of reasons why he thought his marriage had broken up, but either he’d kept this one to himself or maybe didn’t even know it yet. I’d never guessed, but you know how bad I am at that!

Anyway, the guy was wearing some kind of uniform I didn’t recognize; almost like a National Park ranger, but basically brown. They were walking along, bumping shoulders, heading for a diner, and Uniform Guy seemed to be in the middle of a monologue (like me when I get going) and my old pal looked patient, then suddenly said something and they both started laughing, their faces lit up like I think mine lights up around you. 

So Ray (my bartender friend, huh, I just realized he’s go the same name as that guy you married and had the bowling alley with, and wasn’t that the first one’s name, too?) has finally found happiness in true love. I haven’t seen in him years, but I’m still happy for him. He’s getting his freak on, pretty regularly, I’d say, with the second prettiest person in Chicago (the first is you, of course).

It’s nice to see that everyone’s getting what they want from life these days.

Anyway, it just made my day. 

…and now I’ve reread this and maybe I should edit out part of it, because I want to make it clear that I’ve hurt myself on any class (or glass!) walls around you. And maybe I should take out those cracks about the Rays (“your” Rays). I’ll bin it in drafts for later, and if I send it by accident, you’ll at least know I gave it a second thought!

Love you, Stella. Love you the whole wide world, plus some of the asteroid belt.

Lisa  
PS: So, we still on for dinner at a seven? And maybe we can get a little freaky afterward ourselves?

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't tag this with utmost accuracy, because I wanted to get in that last twist beyond the whole dramatic irony of the gulf between what Lisa thinks she saw and what she atually saw, and even vaguely warning for it wouldn't have worked. I hope that doesn't bother people too much.


End file.
